SCIENTISTS plan to explore one of Earth’s coldest, deepest ocean trenches starting Saturday, the first stop in a three-year examination of the ocean’s most mysterious depths.
The Kermadec Trench dives 32,963 feet (10,047 metres) deep offshore of New Zealand in the Pacific Ocean. Waters flowing into the trench from Antarctica make the gorge one of the coldest ocean canyons on Earth, according to a statement from the National Science Foundation.
The team will explore life in the trenches by collecting DNA and exploring the deep-sea habitat with remotely operated vehicles such as the National Science Foundation’s Nereus ROV and the University of Aberdeen’s Hadal-Lander, based in Scotland.
Research teams have explored Kermadec before with ROVs and cameras, finding strange marine creatures such as massive, shrimp-like crustaceans called amphipods that live 4 miles (6 kilometres) beneath the sea surface.
The new expedition, slated to kick off Saturday (April 12), is the first step in an international collaboration designed to systematically study and compare life in deep ocean trenches and neighbouring seafloor plains.
